Mars Symbioscience - Sustainabilityhttps://www.marssymbioscience.com/media/sustainability-0
enAustralian marine scientist works to protect coral reefs and fish populations in Indonesiahttps://www.marssymbioscience.com/media/in-the-news/sustainability/2017/australian-marine-scientist-works-protect-coral-reefs-and-fish
<div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.marssymbioscience.com/sites/default/files/styles/medium/public/1-8592844-16x9-large.jpg?itok=eHmKjM3y" width="220" height="124" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-news-source field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Australia Plus</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-date-published field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2017-06-08T00:00:00-04:00">Thursday, June 8, 2017</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-press-category field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/media/sustainability-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sustainability</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p><strong><em>Coral reefs in Indonesia are being adversely affected by overfishing, pollution and tourism, but on the island of Sulawesi an Australian marine scientist is doing her bit to support rehabilitation efforts.</em></strong></p>
<p>Siobhan Heatwole is volunteering in the port town of Makassar, helping to educate the local population about more sustainable practices to protect the ocean and marine life well into the future.</p>
<p>"Some people in Indonesia use dynamite and cyanide fishing to catch fishes, which kills a lot of fishes that are not the intended targets, and damages and kills a lot of coral," says Siobhan.</p>
<p>"If the destructive fishing practices cease, then yes, with time the reef can often recover. Coral takes a long time to grow though, so it will take a long time for a damaged reef to fully recover." As a Coral Reef Rehabilitation Advisor Siobhan is passionate about conserving the environment, and believes more needs to be done to help communities strike a balance between making a living and protecting their local environment.</p>
<p>"When I saw the reef rehabilitation assignment in Makassar advertised [with AVID], it grabbed me straight away," she says.</p>
<p>"I had been working as a marine researcher studying the impacts of human disturbances on coral reefs. My work had implications for conservation, but was more theoretical. I thought it would be great to put some of that knowledge into practice, and get involved in a project ‘on the ground’ where I was actively contributing to conservation and promoting sustainable fishing practices by working with local people."</p>
<p>Siobhan and her team at Mars Symbioscience are working towards giving these damaged reefs a ‘kick start’ in their recovery by putting down structures that act as a base for new corals to grown on, by attaching healthy coral fragments to those structures.</p>
<p><img src="/sites/default/files/2-8592838-3x2-large.jpg" /><br /><em>Siobhan is helping local staff Siobhan is helping local staff at Mars Symbioscience Mariculture facility in Sulawesi. Supplied: Darren James</em></p>
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</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source field-type-link-field field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="http://www.australiaplus.com/international/study-and-innovation/marine-scientist-works-to-protect-coral-reefs/8592908">See Full Story on Australia Plus</a></div></div></div>Thu, 08 Jun 2017 15:47:26 +0000kilcodan231 at https://www.marssymbioscience.comReef Avengershttps://www.marssymbioscience.com/media/in-the-news/sustainability/2017/reef-avengers
<div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.marssymbioscience.com/sites/default/files/styles/medium/public/header-motley-heroes.jpg?itok=HVpReNk2" width="220" height="106" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-news-source field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Hakai Magazine</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-date-published field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2017-05-30T00:00:00-04:00">Tuesday, May 30, 2017</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-press-category field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/media/sustainability-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sustainability</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p><strong><em>Indonesia’s reefs have been poisoned or blasted to smithereens by the very people who depend on them the most. Now islanders are working to restore the coral, and recover the resources they’ve lost, piece by&nbsp;piece.</em></strong></p>
<p>by Theodora Sutcliffe, Published May 16,&nbsp;2017</p>
<p>Badi is a tiny, white-sand droplet of an island that pokes out of the Indian Ocean as though it’s gasping for air, just meters above the sea. It’s even tinier than it was a few decades ago—though rising sea levels are not, for once, the main culprit. Fishermen, using bombs and cyanide instead of hooks and nets to increase their catches, destroyed much of the protective coral barrier that normally surrounds the island. It’s a pattern of destruction that extends across the Indonesian archipelago, even in the marine region known as the Coral Triangle, an area that, in its natural state, looks like a gigantic tropical aquarium without&nbsp;walls.</p>
<p>Badi’s fisherfolk added to the destruction of their outer reef by mining coral for houses. The losses left the island vulnerable to waves and currents. So much of the shoreline eroded that an entire row of houses had to be dismantled before they washed away. On satellite images, the evanescent sand from the island trails like a ghostly shroud across the seabed, sucked out to the deep sea through the gap in the&nbsp;reef.</p>
<p>As the reef died, the fish disappeared, and locals on Badi wanted them back. In 2006, Noel Janetski, a hard-charging Australian exec who led the Indonesian arm of Mars, the corporate giant that produces everything from candy to pet food, started trialing solutions to rebuild the reef. It was part of a long-term initiative by the family-owned company—which incorporates fish and seaweed into some of its products—to help support the oceans. Seven years later, Janetski finally settled on a method he could scale: attaching coral fragments to hexagonal metal frames known as spiders, which he locks together on the ocean&nbsp;floor.</p>
<p><img src="/sites/default/files/badi-satellite-motley-heroes.jpg" /><br /><em>Destructive fishing practices on Badi, in the Makassar Strait, took out a large swath of reef and led to erosion on the southwest side of the island. Photo by&nbsp;Google/DigitalGlobe</em></p>
<p>In 2014, after around 18 months of work, everyone on Badi could see that progress had been made. Clownfish danced in the anemones; seahorses swayed with the seagrass; gaudy nudibranchs lounged on young coral. It was then, in the dead calm of a November night, that Badi’s cyanide fishermen went out to catch fish for the aquarium trade, spraying poison on the new-grown&nbsp;reef.</p>
<!--p><p>This push-pull between locals who sign onto long-term economic and environmental goals and those who fixate on short-term gains—and sometimes people cling to both at the same time—is one of the most basic problems of sustainable development. Out of all the islands in the South Sulawesi region of Indonesia, Badi has one of the best chances of winning the long game—if fishermen can resist&nbsp;temptation.</p>
<p>Life on Badi, as on thousands of islets like it, is a fragile affair. Around 2,000 people pack into its 10 hectares like farmed salmon. Rows of primary-colored houses spiral around the island’s epicenter, a brushed-sand soccer pitch. Trash-fattened goats and emaciated ducks patrol the crumbling graveyard; mothers tend minuscule general stores and jumbo babies; barefoot children play outside the three small schools. Occasionally, a slick youth cruises past on a shiny motorbike, a signifier of urban sophistication that feels as out of place as it is unnecessary here, 30-odd minutes by speedboat from Makassar, the nearest city on the Sulawesi&nbsp;mainland.</p>
<p>A couple of generations back, Badi was a different place. Island elders remember when the well provided fresh water—not the undrinkable saline that comes up now. Houses had gardens; people grew mangoes, guava, breadfruit, and vegetables; the seas were alive with fish. One successful fisherman in his 60s, who now sends his boats more than 1,000 kilometers north to catch and trade, remembers schools of tuna just a few hours from&nbsp;home.</p>
<p>The shore of the island of Badi, South Sulawesi,&nbsp;Indonesia</p>
<p>So far, nearly two hectares of reef have been restored on the small Indonesian island of Badi. Photo by Theodora&nbsp;Sutcliffe</p>
<p>Back then, the diverse reef system around Indonesia—a scattered nation with almost six million square kilometers of marine territory and perhaps as many as 18,307 islands, depending on whom you ask—seemed like an inexhaustible source of food. Generations of fisherfolk took the rich reefs for granted. Aside from blasting the reef with bottle bombs, poisoning it with cyanide, and mining coral to build their homes, they hurled anchors into the sea with blithe abandon and strolled across brittle table coral as though it was already white sand. It’s easy now to blame the islanders for their lack of foresight, but as in most socioeconomic-environmental scenarios, the problem is more tangled than it may seem, with roots in the last century’s tumultuous period of&nbsp;globalization.</p>
<p>The practice of blast fishing is even older than the nation of Indonesia. In South Sulawesi, the province to which Badi belongs, it almost counts as traditional fishing. During the Second World War, Japanese soldiers first showed indigenous fishermen how to toss bombs into schools of fish to stun or annihilate everything within range. Around one-third of the booty floated to the surface; freedivers picked the rest off the shattered reef. The skills of locating schools of fish, and assembling and timing bombs, are passed down the generations just as line fishing or freediving techniques&nbsp;are.</p>
<p>A typical bottle bomb, a mix of liquid fuel and smuggled ammonium nitrate fertilizer, shatters corals within a meter or so of the blast epicenter into fine rubble and fragments colonies up to four meters away. A single blast is recoverable—reefs can grow back within five to 10 years—but in modern Indonesia, blast fishing is no cottage industry, and fishermen rarely limit themselves to a single bomb. The gut-juddering boom of an explosion is a routine accompaniment to an hour-long dive in some areas. Where fishermen have systematically blasted entire swaths of reef, recovery can take&nbsp;centuries.</p>
<p>The technique of blast fishing with bottle bombs, popular in Indonesia, can instantly flatten a coral reef. Photo by Underwater/Alamy Stock&nbsp;Photo</p>
<p>Cyanide fishing is a younger trade than blast fishing. The practice most likely reached Indonesia around 1970, initially to service Hong Kong’s hunger for large, live, high-status fish: a humphead wrasse, for example, can sell for US $50,000 to the restaurant trade. Divers, who breathe through long hoses connected to the type of compressors used for spraying paint, squirt a fine mist of cyanide into the water, paralyzing their prey and killing corals and smaller fish in the&nbsp;process.</p>
<p>Although both kinds of fishing have been illegal since 1985, the solution is not as simple as convincing the average local fisherman to adopt more sustainable techniques. A sophisticated mafia organizes the distribution of smuggled fertilizer and the collection and sale of the catches. Typically, wealthy investors provide loans to middlemen to buy equipment—from fuses to diving gear and boats to satellite phones. They, in turn, loan money to uneducated, small-island fisherfolk, who repay their debts with bombed or poisoned fish at rates set by the men who lent the&nbsp;money.</p>
<p>Officials have historically tended to look the other way, if it’s worth their while—as a nation, Indonesia scores just 37 out of 100 on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (with zero defined as “highly corrupt”). The people who police Indonesia’s islands have often paid to acquire their jobs in anticipation of later receiving lucrative bribes. Locals report that some officials on long-term postings to remote islands even set up their own illegal fishing&nbsp;businesses.</p>
<p>Mohammad Hidayat, a charismatic career cop, is one exception. During his tenure in South Sulawesi, he worked both to educate islanders and enforce the law. Accompanied by a full squadron of police photographers and videographers, signet ring flashing, he visited Badi and other islands and struck fear into illegal fishermen. He set up turtle sanctuaries and wrote and recorded ditties about reef protection for schoolchildren to sing. His officers, dressed in full uniform and dive gear, posed for underwater photos. As his finale, last year he and his successor, Edi Kurniawan, blew up confiscated bombing materials in a blaze of publicity.<br />&nbsp;save-our-seas.mp3</p>
<p>Mohammad Hidayat, an enthusiastic karaoke singer and a former chief of police in the South Sulawesi region, recorded this ditty about ocean conservation. Courtesy of Mohammad Hidayat<br />
While the national government has also tried to do its part to curtail destructive fishing and restore reefs, the sheer scale of Indonesia’s marine territory makes many high-level initiatives ineffective. Reef restoration and protection works best when managed at the grassroots level, especially in a place known for hyper-local&nbsp;loyalties.</p>
<p>Faced with diminished marine stocks, islanders have begun counting the costs of reef destruction and are working, in disparate ways, to bring the fish back&nbsp;home.</p>
<p>Jochen Schultheis, an eccentric German transplant who runs a dive resort on the island of Selayar, roughly 160 kilometers southeast of Badi, guards a no-take zone established for his resort. He defends the reef, and the fish he considers his friends, by boarding passing boats and sabotaging dive gear used for illegal fishing, mounting night patrols along the shoreline, and raiding camps and large ships alongside&nbsp;police.</p>
<p>On Cengkeh, a tiny islet roughly 20 kilometers north of Badi, octogenarians Daeng Abu, who is blind from leprosy, and Daeng Maida raise turtles. When not preaching to visitors about the evils of blast and cyanide fishing, they chase intruders off the reef in their tiny&nbsp;skiff.</p>
<p>Octogenarians Daeng Abu and Daeng Maida have lived on the islet of Cengkeh (a former burial ground) and raised turtles since 1972. Today they are advocates for the area’s reefs. Photo by Theodora&nbsp;Sutcliffe</p>
<p>Muhammad Ramli, a nurse in training, regularly leads a group of fellow students on a 24-hour journey by public boat from Sulawesi to the district they all originate from, Liukang Tangaya—a cluster of 30-odd rocky islands 185 kilometers south of Badi. They educate locals about the dangers of destructive fishing and encourage illegal fishermen to pursue more sustainable lines of&nbsp;work.</p>
<p>But it’s Badi that has received the bulk of attention from the Mars company, NGOs, and government, and Badi that remains the poster child for reef&nbsp;rehabilitation.</p>
<p>On a sunny September morning, the shallows around Badi are alive with fisherfolk and the scent of clove cigarettes fills the air. Paid islanders, with the hardened, nimble fingers of men who deal with hooks and nets, attach spiky coral clippings to the metal-frame spiders and zip them tight with cable ties. Other workers transport the spiders by boat to the reef, where Janetski, aided by a team of snorkelers, carefully connects them on the seafloor; if the spiders aren’t properly secured, entire sections of new reef can roll up like a carpet when tough conditions blow&nbsp;in.</p>
<p>Illustration by Mark&nbsp;Garrison</p>
<p>Over the years, the workers have restored about two hectares, which Janetski believes makes this the largest contiguous coral reef rehabilitation project in the world. And in an attempt to create an economy that can draw people away from destructive fishing, Mars has helped two families start seahorse and clownfish farms for the aquarium trade and is trialing barramundi cod farming with a third. The company provides everything from expensive technology, such as solar panels, to juvenile fish and helps establish routes to&nbsp;market.</p>
<p>The reef is returning to health. The fish are coming back. Many islanders have bought into the program, and Badi seems a stellar example of how reef rehabilitation could and should work, given sufficient resources. Janetski hopes to create a template that can be rolled out across Indonesia and has started work on a second, similar island called Bontosua, not far from&nbsp;Badi.</p>
<p>The success is encouraging, if tenuous—there’s always some risk that what happened in 2014 will repeat, when the pull of quick cash overpowers the push for long-term&nbsp;gain.</p>
<p>With an election process underway, the atmosphere on Badi in late 2014 was a perfect storm of dynastic grievances and local politics. When the island’s cyanide fishermen descended on the newly restored reef, there was uproar. “Other local people reported them to the police. The police came out, picked them up, and brought them back to Makassar,” Janetski recalls. Island gossip indicates that their boss in Makassar simply bought the fishermen out of&nbsp;jail.</p>
<p>When they returned from prison, a senior member of the cyanide-fishing pyramid fueled their rage with beer—a rare indulgence on a Muslim island where a fisherman might earn only US $30 per month. Full of alcohol and indignation, the men and their allies waded out into the shallows where Janetski was raising coral for transplantation. They ripped his nursery out of the water, smashed it to pieces, and topped the spiky pile of rubble with a white flag. Other islanders stood on the shore and&nbsp;wept.</p>
<p>This video clip offers a fish-eye view of a coral reef in Indonesia. Video by&nbsp;longjourneys/videoblocks</p>
<p>Today, something of a truce has been reached: islanders, protective of their community, deny to outsiders that cyanide fishing exists, and Badi’s cyanide fishermen stay off their home reef. But, unless and until they adopt a new trade, rehabilitation efforts won’t solve the problem—only relocate&nbsp;it.</p>
<p>Promisingly, the initiatives on Badi and other islands in South Sulawesi seem to be sparking a movement; with government support, many communities now boast their own no-take zones—and some even enforce them. Jamal Jompa, a marine biologist and dean of marine sciences and fisheries at Hasanuddin University in Makassar, recalls dropping anchor to dive at some remote islands when a speedboat of locals swung by to check he wasn’t using cyanide or&nbsp;bombs.</p>
<p>“That’s not an initiative by the government. It’s their own agreement,” he says. “[I] believe that the solution is … to make the people of the islands know their problem and find their own solution and facilitate them to agree on their solution that they can&nbsp;implement.”</p>
<p>Out in the clear waters of Makassar Strait, it’s difficult to see in places where Badi’s original reef ends and new growth begins. Within two years, if left undisturbed, the steel spiders become almost completely covered with young staghorn and table corals. Damselfish, butterflyfish, and angelfish flit around them; a young grouper flutters below a table coral; a couple of turtles nap on the deeper reef; and sleek barracudas cruise by, all re-establishing their own push-pull of a healthy&nbsp;ecosystem.</p-->
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source field-type-link-field field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="https://www.hakaimagazine.com/article-long/reef-avengers">See Full Story in Hakai Magazine</a></div></div></div>Tue, 30 May 2017 19:29:19 +0000kilcodan230 at https://www.marssymbioscience.comCherie Colyer-Morris: How being an intern in Indonesia changed my view of sciencehttps://www.marssymbioscience.com/media/sustainability/2017/cherie-colyer-morris-how-being-intern-indonesia-changed-my
<div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.marssymbioscience.com/sites/default/files/styles/medium/public/8531306-16x9-large.jpg?itok=EC5_LyyQ" width="220" height="124" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-news-source field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Australia Plus</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-date-published field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2017-05-17T00:00:00-04:00">Wednesday, May 17, 2017</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-press-category field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/media/sustainability-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sustainability</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p><strong><em>Marine science student Cherie Colyer-Morris spent six months working as an intern on a marine sustainability project in Indonesia in 2015. It's had a profound impact on her career ever since.</em></strong></p>
<p>Cherie Colyer-Morris has a passion for marine science.</p>
<p>"I'm very curious about understanding our coastal and marine ecosystems, and our interactions with [those] ecosystems," she says.</p>
<p>It was on a short trip to Indonesia, as part of her undergraduate studies at the University of Newcastle, that she first witnessed some of the marine sustainability challenges facing developing communities.</p>
<p>"I… volunteered on a community outreach program, so it introduced me to the sustainability issues that are actually present in communities," she says.</p>
<p>"[These issues] would have relatively simple solutions had there been… a way to instigate them."</p>
<p>Cherie became interested in the interface between science and society, and what creates behavioural change.</p>
<p>"Even though you've got a scientific answer that doesn't mean anything until you're able to apply it, and the people are able to adopt it on their own."</p>
<p>Later in her degree, Cherie got the opportunity to return to Indonesia for a six month internship, as part of a New Colombo Plan scholarship.</p>
<p>The New Colombo Plan aims to deepen Australia's relationships with other countries in the Indo-Pacific region, through people-to-people and institution-to-institution links.</p>
<p>"It was a very-early-haven't-finished-university-yet sabbatical," she laughs.</p>
<p><img src="/sites/default/files/1-8531336-3x2-large.jpg" /><br /><em>In the office: Cherie working on the Pulau Badi reef restoration project. Supplied: Cherie Colyer-Morris</em></p>
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</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source field-type-link-field field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="http://www.australiaplus.com/international/study-and-innovation/cherie-colyer-morris-how-being-an-intern-in-indonesia-changed/8531288">See Full Story on Australia Plus</a></div></div></div>Wed, 17 May 2017 18:27:57 +0000kilcodan227 at https://www.marssymbioscience.comMars Symbioscience Joins Global Corporate Leaders As A Founding Partner Of Impact 2030https://www.marssymbioscience.com/media/sustainability-0/2016/mars-symbioscience-joins-global-corporate-leaders-founding-partner
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p><strong><i>Company Mobilizes Associates to Achieve Sustainable Development&nbsp;Goals</i></strong></p>
<p><i>GERMANTOWN, MD</i>, September 14, 2016 – <a href="/">Mars&nbsp;Symbioscience</a> (MSS), the global health and life sciences segment of <a href="http://www.mars.com">Mars,&nbsp;Incorporated</a>, has joined IMPACT 2030 as a Founding Partner. MSS is an incubator for evidence-based innovations that positively impact the health and well-being of people and the planet. MSS, through Mars Sustainable Solutions™, is working to achieve social, economic and environmental sustainable solutions that have a positive impact on the communities that supply Mars’s critical raw materials. As an IMPACT 2030 Founding Partner, MSS will join forces with 17 other corporate Founding Partners from around the globe to help achieve the United Nation’s <a href="http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/">Sustainable Development&nbsp;Goals</a> (SDGs). This announcement was made today as more than 100 leaders arrived in New York City to attend the Inaugural IMPACT 2030&nbsp;Summit.</p>
<p>IMPACT 2030, a collaboration between the United Nations and the business sector, unites companies in their corporate volunteering efforts to help advance Global Goals – to end poverty, fight inequality and tackle climate change – by&nbsp;2030.</p>
<p>“Our Associates are our greatest assets – it is their skills and expertise, and most importantly, their passion, that enable us to positively and sustainably impact our world,” said Heather Pfahl, Sustainability Manager, Mars Symbioscience. “Each day we seek to tangibly show our commitment as a company and as individuals to the communities where we work, live and operate. We use our social, human and environmental capital to catalyze mutual benefit for communities and business. We are proud of how our strategic and integrated ecosystem approach contributes toward nine of the&nbsp;SDGs.”</p>
<p>For example, MSS contributes to Goal 14 in Indonesia, focusing efforts on conserving and sustainably using the oceans, seas and marine resources. There, MSS is promoting behavior change by developing alternative livelihoods through small-enterprise development in sustainable aquaculture of seahorses and ornamental&nbsp;fish.</p>
<p>“By increasing the fishermen’s income four-fold through sustainable techniques, fishermen are reducing their dependency on devastating fishing practices that have destroyed over 80 percent of the coral reef ecosystems in Indonesia,” said Pfahl. “Just as important for them and for Mars, the Coral Triangle is where 40 percent of the world’s tuna population spawns every&nbsp;year.”</p>
<p>Associates Contribute to Scalable and Sustainable&nbsp;Solutions</p>
<p>Mars, Incorporated, through the company’s worldwide Associate engagement programs, such as the Mars Volunteer Program (MVP) and the Mars Ambassador Program (MAP), encourages all 80,000 Associates at Mars to volunteer their time and skills ‒ organizing, leading and recruiting other volunteers to join them to make a difference in the communities where they live and work. MSS takes this initiative one step further by engaging Associates directly in its effort to deliver restorative and sustainable solutions in the remote island communities where its marine-based raw materials are sourced, and where they depend upon healthy coral&nbsp;reefs.</p>
<p>Over the past five years, MSS has developed a novel, yet practical, low-cost and scalable system to accelerate coral reef rehabilitation. MSS Associates, working alongside Mars volunteer Associates around the world via the Mars Ambassador Program, have installed over 10,000 “Mars Coral Spiders” underwater across two hectares of reef. The evidence shows the coral cover on the reef’s rehabilitated areas increased from 10 percent to 60 percent in about 18 months, as has the reef fish population, including tuna, which had not been seen off this island for over 30 years. Consistent with Goal 17, MSS is now working alongside universities, NGOs and business partners to baseline a second island/reef so as to validate this&nbsp;reef</p>
<p>rehabilitation system scientifically over the next four years in order to support its potential use by others to rehabilitate coral reefs around the&nbsp;world.</p>
<p></p><center><img src="/sites/default/files/field/image/reef-before-and-after.jpeg" width="400"&nbsp;/></center>
<p>Added Pfahl, “Our Associate volunteer programs are powerful demonstrations of how MSS puts Mars’ Five Principles – Quality, Responsibility, Mutuality, Efficiency and Freedom – into action in local communities to deliver mutual benefits. Like IMPACT 2030, I cannot stress enough that the success of our business, and our ability to deliver growth we are proud of, is built on multi-stakeholder collaboration as well as partnering with communities from where we source our raw materials. We are proud to be a Founding Partner of IMPACT 2030 and we are excited to join other global corporate leaders to address the UN Development&nbsp;Agenda.”</p>
<p>“Corporate action, in concert with the UN, government, academia and civil society, is critical to meeting the Global Goals set by the UN by 2030; this amazing opportunity brings companies together around the SDGs, exploring ways that their most valuable asset, their people, can do the most good for the world,” explained Dr. Tauni Lanier, Executive Director, IMPACT 2030. “We thank Mars Symbioscience and their Associates for their commitment to addressing the grand challenges of the 21st&nbsp;century.”</p>
<p>For more information about Mars Symbioscience and the company’s commitment to IMPACT 2030 visit <a href="http://www.marssymbioscience.com/principles-in-action">www.marssymbioscience.com/principles-in-action</a>.</p>
<p>About IMPACT&nbsp;2030</p>
<p>IMPACT 2030 is collaboration between the United Nations and the business sector to help achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals by 2030 through corporate employee volunteering. Each IMPACT 2030 partner company has committed to applying its employee volunteer actions towards one or more of the Global Goals. Founding partners include: Google, GSK, IBM, Mars Symbioscience, Medtronic, SAP, TATA Consultancy Services, The Dow Chemical Company and The Ritz Carlton Hotel Company. Learn more by visiting IMPACT2030.com and following @IMPACT2030 on Twitter. Join the conversation using&nbsp;#IMPACT2030.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-press-category field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/media/sustainability-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sustainability</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-date-published field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2016-09-14T00:00:00-04:00">Wednesday, September 14, 2016</span></div></div></div>Fri, 16 Sep 2016 13:45:01 +0000kilcodan225 at https://www.marssymbioscience.com